Mobile Voter, the group that innovation voter registration by text message, recently launched a program to turn people with a few minutes to spare waiting for a train or in line at the grocery store into volunteers. The program is called Volunteer Now, and it connects volunteers with projects through text messages. The combination of technology and civic action fits neatly into Mobile Voter’s mission to use technology to empower civic life and political engagement, with a specific focus on youth

Ben Rigby, Co-Executive Director of Mobile Voter, filled me in on the details about Volunteer Now. (Rigby is also the author of a ne w book, Mobilizing Generation 2.0.)

What does it do?

Volunteer Now enables people to spontaneously offer their expertise via mobile phones. Missed your train? Got 20 minutes? Review a contract for a nonprofit. Translate a document for a non English speaker. Identify craters for NASA. Give back in your spare time!

What inspired you to do it?

Projects like SETI@Home have showed that massive computational problems can be solved when a distributed group of people donate their computers’ spare CPUs to crunch data. This project will explore the possibility that this same theory can be applied to spare human “CPUs.” We believe that it will reveal a massive untapped capacity to do good.

How can people get involved?

They can contact me: ben@mobilevoter.org. We’re looking for programmers, designers, and creative people with great ideas to volunteer for the project. It’s an all volunteer/open source project.

At SXSW Interactive in Austin this week, I met up with Howard Tsao, the CEO of Social Sauce, a new social site that offers some interesting tools.

Remember when Senator Ben Nelson created a multi-media journal on Google Maps that tracked his travels in Iraq? What about when the White House covered President Bush’s recent trip to the Middle East, journal-style? Social Sauce offers some of these same features on one site.

I spoke with Tsao about the site and how it might be used in the political space.

Me: What did you create?

Howard: We created a community site, Sosauce.com, for people who care about their content, experiences, and interests. The tools such as Travel, Journal, and Photo that we build, in comparison to other social networks, are powerful, fun, and pretty easy to use.

Me: What does it do? How might it be used in politics?

Howard: The Journal tool is tailored for writing about various interest,s such as politics. It is as easy as 1 click to create multiple blogs/journals on different interests, so for the first time, a reader can be exposed to different topics of interests, knowledge, and thoughts of a politician easily in one place. When writing, photos from our Photo tool, which really displays photos in high quality and resolution, and videos from Youtube can be easy inserted; this places the reading experience in better context. Sosauce Journal has community pages, subscriptions, and feeds into people’s Update Feeds for interesting writing to be discovered as well.

The Travel tool is unique because it takes trip recording and sharing to a different level. Officials can track trips to the Middle East more interactively and informatively, and the viewers of the trip can find the information more easily and readily digestible. They can also interact with the trip and all the content (journal, photo, tips, reviews, and points of interests) in a fashion that is much more fun. Officials can write about, and pin the map, on not just the official occurrences, but also personal observations and experiences. This way, the viewers can get a much more holistic and human perspective of a trip.

Interesting content rises to the top in our community pages, and we will also actively fe

As in other social networks, profile customization, friend network building, community content viewing and finding, communications (message, comments, updates, rating, subscriptions), privacy settings (3 levels for each piece of personal information and content), and connections to outside of Sosauce (email each content, subscription updates, and post links) are integrated into the site. This way, not only can people view contents of the officials, they also have all the tools at their disposal to interact and connect with the officials in a more meaningful way. We also take privacy, copyright, and the content very seriously. So for derogatory and hateful remarks, there are tools to block, report, and remove them.

Me: What did you use to create it?

Howard: It took us about a year to develop Sosauce into what it is today. We built the site using java, Ajax, Css, Html, and Flash programming languages. It is a labor of love, and we really hope you will enjoy using it as much as the people on Sosauce do.